This House of Sky - Ivan Doig [137]
And soon after, the confirming lines of puzzle and suspicion from Grandma. He doesn't seem to improve any. He's getting the same as before. Sleep days and up and down all nite. Usually eats three sandwitches during the nite with milk. But he doesn't eat a good meal.... For the thousandth time I thought through the specter of his final hospital stay, and readied myself for the news that I would have to come once more and deliver him to the prospect.
I had forgotten that the great constant in my father was surprise. In early April, on the third morning after Dad's seventieth birthday, Grandma stepped to his doorway to begin him on another day of existing. At the bed, he was on his back with his head and upper body tilted to the right, his mouth open, as if having turned to speak an answer over his shoulder. In his custom now, the bedcovers had been flipped aside because of their burden on his laboring chest. His pajamas were scarcely mussed, and the square-cut face was freed of its straining look. And in the instant when his heart at last had convulsed in him and ended his life so silently and immediately that no hint of it could be heard in a room fifteen feet away, his right arm had flung wide, catching the tether of oxygen tube and tearing it from his nostrils.
By early afternoon I was in Montana, by dusk had made the burial arrangements, that night slept in the bed where my father had died less than twenty hours before. Grandma was teary-eyed, but steadier than I would have been from looking in on death in the dawn light. We both were startled, after the dragging years of near-helplessness, at the staccato pace of everything to be done now. Having arranged a furlough from her classes, Carol flew in from Seattle, propped us both with her efficiency.
Late in the second day, the minister who would read the funeral service came to the house. Across the years, I can think of little more remote from my father's range of mind than religion. Once in my boyhood, a pair of Jehovah's Witnesses had come to our door. Dad gave them his levelest look, proclaimed We're staunch Presbyterians here, and had the door closed on the visitors before they could blink. I gaped at him, and received his joke-calculating grin: Never knew we was so pious, did ye? I certainly didn't, and can think of no other time religion became a topic under our roof. The funeral minister now found that I was a bland target for his tries at commiseration. He soon asked what Bible reading I wished at the funeral service.
The one where God speaks to Job from the whirlwind.
Job 38, that would be? He sat higher in his chair. It's not a ... usual funeral choice. I said nothing. Well ... The first few verses, I imagine? The readings usually are brief....
No, all of it. All the chapter. We're in no hurry after these years.
He nodded, offered a hand, was gone.
I did not believe in funerals and the customs of public grief, but I believed less in doing anything not understandable to Grandma. I braced, and on the morning before the funeral drove her across town to the chapel to see Dad in his casket. He looked milder than in life, calm and unscarred except for the star-print in the center of his square chin. She looked down at him, gave a sob, and said her one last sentence to him: Oh Charlie, why did you have to die?
Then the afternoon, and across the chapel, faces from two lifetimes—my father's, my own—hung row on row. I looked out among them as the preacher's words marched. Where was thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? ... The lone black face of Taylor Gordon, nodding softly to the Bible rhythms. Clifford's head among the pallbearers, undressed without his rancher's hat atop it. Hast thou commanded the morning. ... Sun-dark faces Dad had ridden with and foremanned on the Dogie and the Camas and a dozen other ranches; paler faces from the saloons and stores. Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? ... Faces from the Basin, from winters a half